Eartha Kitt's Vietnam comments nearly ended her career

It was a year of conflict and unease, yet, 1968 was also a year of hope. Join the USA Today Network as we explore the most impactful turning point moments of 1968.
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1960: (FILE PHOTO) American singer and actress Eartha Kitt decked poses in leopard skin and furs for her London stage show 'Talk of the Town', a 45-minute programme of old and new numbers on September 9, 1960. Kitt, 81 died of colon cancer on December 25, 2008 in New York. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 80091809 GTY ID: /46/HUTY/14936/13(Photo: Central Press, Getty Images)

In 1967, Eartha Kitt was arguably at the height of her fame. But a luncheon at the White House in 1968 nearly left her hard-won career in shambles.

Born into poverty in 1927 on a plantation in North, S.C., to a white father and a black and Cherokee mother, Kitt overcame domestic abuse and abandonment to become a renowned singer, dancer and actress on film, television and on Broadway.

Kitt's iconic purr and open embrace of her sexuality, notably captured in the 1953 hit holiday song Santa Baby, captivated fans as well as prominent men such as Orson Welles and cosmetics magnate Charles Revson. It got her cast as Catwoman in the ABC's Batman television series in 1967 and won her a 'sex kitten' image that became her lifelong signature until her death in 2008.

Always outspoken, Kitt was able to channel her celebrity into activism. In May 1967, she testified before Congress, along with Washington D.C. youth group Rebels With a Cause, on behalf of President Lyndon B. Johnson's juvenile delinquency bill.

Lady Bird Johnson subsequently invited Kitt to her Women Doers' Luncheon on Jan. 18, 1968, for a discussion of what women could do to help eradicate crime on the streets.

Eartha Kitt poses in character as Catwoman for the television show "Batman" in 1967.(Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Towards the end of the luncheon, Lady Bird asked the room of 50 women, from groups such as the Association of Colored Women's Club and the League of Women Voters, including a few governor's wives, for their comments.

Kitt raised her hand and told the first lady of the United States exactly what she thought — juvenile crime was in part a pushback against being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War.

"Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn't pay to be a good guy," Kitt said. "They figure with a record they don't have to go off to Vietnam. You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”

Kitt continued: "Mrs. Johnson, you are a mother too, although you have had daughters and not sons. I am a mother and I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my guts. I have a baby and then you send him off to war. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot. And, Mrs. Johnson, in case you don't understand the lingo that's marijuana."

Her comments stunned the first lady. Some media reports erroneously stated that Lady Bird burst into tears. Women in the room ran to the microphone to defend the Johnsons and level outrage at Kitt.

The cultural and political backlash was swift. The Washington Post reported at the time that President Johnson had Kitt blacklisted. According to Broadly, Kitt alleged that the White House, which had sent a car for her, didn't arrange a car for her departure and she had to catch a cab.

Unable to get jobs in the United States, Kitt was forced to perform in Europe until she returned to America in 1978 to headline the Broadway musical Timbuktu! It was later unveiled by the New York Times that the CIA, prompted by the Secret Service in 1968, had kept a dossier on her.

"It was really heart-breaking to her and very upsetting that her own government turned on her for something as simple as just giving an honest response to a question," said Kitt Shapiro, Eartha Kitt's daughter. "And that was really something, I think, that she really never let go of, that disappointment.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson is asked a question by Eartha Kitt at the Women Doers Luncheon on 1/18/1968.(Photo: LBJ Library photo by Kevin Smith)

By 1968, opposition to the war was growing. Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was himself paying the cost, unable to find work, for famously speaking against the war the previous spring and refusing to be drafted. "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," Ali said in April 1967.

“Even somebody like Martin Luther King was actually falling out of favor by 1968 because Martin Luther King had critiqued the Vietnam War and had critiqued colonialism and had critiqued capitalism,” said Sarah J. Jackson, author of Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press.

Reports about the incident made it seem that Kitt, was an 'angry black woman' who had made Lady Bird cry.

“My mother said she never saw any tears. She didn’t feel that she was being disrespectful. She didn’t raise her voice," said Shapiro. “That being said, my mother was not one who feared upsetting the avant-garde. And if you asked for her opinion, you better be prepared (because) you were going to get it.”

Even Lady Bird in her private diary wrote, “One paper said that I was pale and that my voice trembled slightly as I replied to Miss Kitt. I think that is correct. I did not have tears in my eyes as another paper said.”

But lost in the kerfuffle of whether or not Kitt disrespected Lady Bird was the context of Kitt's comments about poverty, crime and the war.

“The public missed an opportunity to hear the critique that she was leveling and weigh it,” said Jackson, who believes that part of the reasons Kitt's comments were lost in the public discourse was because she was a black woman.

Women celebrities, like Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, and Josephine Baker were engaging in public activism during this era similar to the activism of Harry Belafonte, Ali, or John Carlos and Tommy Smith. “But they didn’t fit the mold of what an activist looked like and so often these stories didn’t get told. Eartha Kitt’s story didn’t get told by journalists as a form of activism. It got told as this sort of like interpersonal gendered conflict instead,” Jackson said.

Kitt's career rebounded after her return in 1978, which was accompanied by an invitation to return to the White House that year by President Jimmy Carter. By the time of her death from colon cancer in 2008, she had earned two Tony nominations, a Grammy nomination, won three Daytime Emmys, and had transformed from kitten to full-blown cougar goddess.

And fifty years after her career nearly derailed, black celebrity activism remains just as controversial and influential.

“What the 1960s gave us was that it became normal for us to realize that not only is dissent and critique of the establishment okay but it’s actually useful and it results in social progress,” said Jackson.